this post was submitted on 27 May 2025
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If that's what you're buying in a single month, I'd hate to know how much you're buying in a year.
The sad truth is that you're spending this money but you're never going to have the time to enjoy more than the upper crust of what all these games have to offer. You might dive deep on a handful of them, but you're just lighting the rest of that money on fire and likely condemning a lot of good games to the digital equivalent of rotting on a shelf.
Unless this is some roundabout way of supporting dev teams this screams unfettered consumerism to me.
I'm not trying to offend you I promise. This is just very odd to me. I don't even think I've played 200 games in my life and I've spent a fuckload of time immersed in games of all kinds for ~30 years.
I’ve played 22% of my Steam library and 25% of my GOG library.
Most of the time, I don’t finish the games. But I’ve got maybe 1 hour of enjoyment out of most of them—sometimes more. And I typically pay less than C$1.00 per game.
Meanwhile, at my local arcade, I sometimes pay $1.00 for a mere minutes of play.
Is it unfettered consumerism? Maybe it’s consumerism. If so, it’s certainly fettered.
I place hard limits on what I spend, and each game must be regarded as worth playing.
If there’s one regret I have it’s that I don’t talk about the many hidden gems I experience as much as I wish I did.
Statements of the utterly deranged lol. You admit to buying stuff knowing there's an 80% chance you never touch it. That's indulgent no matter what budget you set.
I'm not one to shame steam libraries, mine is certainly lopsided in playtime, but if you're in it for collecting and preserving hidden gems just pirate. You'll no longer be locked in to Steam and if you like a game you can still buy it at full price and give the devs more than pennies.
Nope, you failed to read what I wrote.
I said I’ve played 22% of my Steam library and 25% of my GOG library.
I also said, at various points, that I’m deliberately pacing myself through my backlog. I have already played around 2,000 titles, and I will be playing more.
Will I be playing all titles I own? Yes, at my own pace, with my own methodology.
Nope, I’m in it for the collecting and the playing.
I’ve never had a Steam game removed from my account due to DRM. And should that ever happen, I have games on GOG that are DRM-free.
But also, I have downloaded and installed several abandonware titles in the past. I find piracy an inconvenient hassle. Both Steam and GOG give me the convenience of cloud storage, which I’m happy to pay less than a dollar for.
Basically, your entire comment boils down to you disapproving of how I enjoy games.
I paid an average price of $0.58 for 226 games—which is the price of a dinner at a restaurant.
Holy shit what restaurant are you going to that charges C$185 for a meal
A meal? I have a family of three.
My apologies, 76% 😂
Do you have a goal where you'll stop and catch up? More games are being released than ever, if you get every deal you see those numbers won't meaningfully converge.
It's not just DRM, the platforms have carte blanche to change the terms of your license at any time. For example, they could start charging per download, completely remove offline library access, remove/censor games, delete your account at any time, etc... Gaben pinky promising to release all games DRM free if Steam goes under isn't the same as having them.
Inheriting a Steam library is already against TOS, if they start strictly enforcing that your collection dies with you. GoG is slightly better at the moment, but only if you download all games on purchase (the DRM policy could change at any time).
I don't personally pirate, but it's the only way to really ensure access and ownership of your library. The hassle factor was true, but there are a lot of new tools in the space that make managing a library painless (a quick search shows Playnite as the game library equivalent of Plex/Jellyfin).
And all of that is putting aside the fair-value argument for creators. They're getting ~$0.40 from your purchase, not enough to sustain themselves unless they have a massive number of sales.
By all means, enjoy your library and deal hunting games, but your methods run counter to your stated goals.
If Valve does something evil, then I’ll adjust when that time comes. For now, I have full access to my entire library, and this has been the case for the past 12 years I’ve had my account.
As far as I’m concerned, you’re thinking so hard about the legal risks of buying games legally, you’re not taking into account the legal risks of piracy.
You think game publishers haven’t sued the living tar out of pirates?
There’s a guy named Gary Bowser who was sent to prison for selling tools that hacked the Nintendo Switch. And when he got out, he still owed $10M.
So if you’re worried about risk, at least acknowledge where the real hammer comes down.
Sure, there are risks both ways but one can be mitigated more than the other. The piracy hammer has always come down on distributors with very rare exceptions. With proper precautions (VPN, usenet, foreign seedbox, etc...) nobody would ever know or care about the private individual self hosting a media server on a closet raspberry pie.
Legally you're covered with Steam but you have very little actual control over your collection. The ideal is legal physical media that you can digitally copy and store but that's basically impossible these days.
Legally, I can download all my installers from GOG, store them to a hard drive, and make a duplicate of that hard drive as a redundancy.
And believe me, I’ve thought about that.
What keeps me from doing that is the price of storage. One title alone can be 120GB.
This is ultimately why I don’t pirate. It costs me $20 for a 128GB SD card. But if I’m buying that game for $4 off Steam, it’s cheaper to store that game in the cloud—especially if I only average a couple hours of play per game.
There’s also the convenience of knowing the game will likely work, I (mostly) don’t have to edit DLLs, and malware is unlikely.
The only reason to pirate is for some bizarre moral reason, which I don’t share. It really is easier to just pay a couple bucks—store indefinitely, get to work immediately.
You'll have to stop buying eventually to play through them all or you're always gonna have some left in the backlog at that rate. Oo maybe you can hand down your library to your kids and they can continue on the effort
I don’t have to play through them all, though. I’m content with a few minutes.
Why should video games provide hours of entertainment?
When I grew up, that wasn’t the expectation. You played Donkey Kong for a moment, then you moved over to Galaga.
I guess it depends on the price point. I suppose even an hour or so I'd be content with if it cost me less than a dollar, you expect a lot more out of a pricier game though
I don't get this, though. Less than 200 games in your life? How? Are you a baby? Do you play games for thousands of hours on a regular basis?
I own thousands of games and my most played games are in the thousands of hours, but if I boot up a game and play an hour of or two it I'm more than happy with that purchase, especially at a discount price. I spent twenty bucks last time I went to the movies and I didn't even enjoy any part of what I watched.
Hmm, looking at the 6 games I have in my steam library since 2017
Hey, that's fine. It's fine to not be into games or anything else.
Weirder to not be into games and hang around a forum called "PC games", but who am I to judge.
I'm a game lover, I just play ones that have a lot of replay value so I don't have to buy so many LOL. I migrated from old C64 to Super Nintendo, Wii and XBOX, XBOX360 but moved to PC gaming and Linux PC gaming around 2017.
I genuinely don't get the patience. You certainly didn't spend the C64 era with five games on that thing. Nobody who had access to a double deck tape recorder did.
And these days if you like "replay value" to that degree there's a ton of free to play grind treadmills. In eight years I'd expect you'd have at least tried a dozen of those. That's less than one new game a year. If you play just two hours a week that's both a bit of a stretch on "game lover" (more of a "very strict parents heavily monitoring their kid" range) and still hundreds of hours on each of those.
I'm not judging. Games are a thing where habits can be very different, it's just... a bit of a extreme.
I'm curious, what games are those? What types of games do you find simultaneously engaging and all-consuming enough to spend a decade in just a handful? That's not a challenge, I'm genuinely asking. Is it fighting games? MOBAs? Definitely not a linear narrative beginning-to-end thing, right? Are you full on speedrunning them at this point or getting really competitive?
Not sure why you got downvoted, it's a legit question. C64 was double tape deck, and then QuikCopy on the diskette drive...so many games, that I spent too much time gaming.
But a few examples of now: WRC there are enough stages and cars and can try for better stage times / try to beat your ghost car etc.
MechWarrior 5 Mercenaries, which has a story arc but once you finish the story you can just keep traveling to look for new contracts, some with difficulty so high you lose a lot of equipment and almost become bankrupt / stranded, so there is always an element of risk. Also some generated worlds/scemery are just gorgeous for exploring. I have hit some game awards only 4% of players worldwide have.
But last few years my time is on MudRunners. (Shit sorry this got way to long)... If you havent tried it: Once you complete the tutorial tasks and a few main maps the game opens up into more freedom, and the tasks and terrain can be challenging. If you burn through that there is a mod community that has built so many more maps, vehicles and challenges.
If you have never played, the initial game is drab Russian vehicles and limited colour pallette scenes, where the goal is finding logs or picking up logs from key areas and delivering them to the saw mill across swampy and muddy maps. The physics are amazing for the terrain, as you drive over areas you are morphing the soft terrains and changing traction. Drive in same area too much or without 4wd engaged and you can easily bury your truck up to the axles, so you then have to hope there is a tree nearby that you can attach your winch to and try to pull yourself out. Sometimes you can't so you have to drive out another vehicle and do a tow out.
The American truckers DLC adds more maps and vehicles and brightens up the scenery. Same game play, different challenges. More variety.
The time in game is sped up for day night cycle, but if you are able to load the logs into your truck or trailer you have to now drive them to the log station, either over hilly fireroads roads, or through forested areas, and cross rivers. There is no timewarp. Its precarious, with janky bridges, and deep water. Wheel placement, 4WD and posi traction locks on/off are needed to navigate out of areas. Managing a load down a grade where hillside camber wants to flip your truck means attaching the winch to side of truck on up hill tree to stop you rolling as you look for a down hilltree to lean truck body against to look for next anchor tree up hill. So it can take you hours to drive 1 mile. A tree breaks or you steer to hard and your truck is on its side and stalled, so you have to drive a rescue vehicle out to try to flip it back on its wheels.
You also have to manage fuel, 4wd and spinning in mud burns through it so fast, so getting a fuel tanker truck setup in a strategic spot so you make less long runs back to a fuel station is key.
Wow, I typed a lot. But seriously I can launch this at 11pm Friday night when wife has gone to bed, and get so engrossed that the sun will start rising Saturday.
And crossing a slanted plank bridge with a huge tank of a specialized russian logging vehicle can have my palms sweating on the controller and holding my breath. One wrong tire placement or miscalculation of how much the truck will slide and you are down in the river watching your logs float away and in fast water watching the truck be dragged down the river. Damage and abuse will degrade the truck, bringing a utility or garage trailer is often required to fix the truck in field. So the game has elements of planning, resource management, goals, understanding wheel placement of off roaring.
But sometimes its just the beauty of driving out of the forest and the mist clears and sun is coming up over the hill, because some mod ad one are gorgeous.
The grappler arm log loader is also fun to operate. And sometimes its marvelling at the effort the devs went to to get soft physics right. You can swap views and see front of truck or Jeeps wheels smushing the mud as you plow forward (and accumulating mud on tires which affects grip), not too much wheel spin or you sink too much, and find out the reason you did get stuck is there is a large rock buried under the mud and its not until you get in the right position that your tire catches the rock and actually rolls it slightly to clear the underbody that you can move on.
So if you have patience for it and free time this game can fill a lot of it. LOL
I got downvoted? I guess that's just a reminder to not trust anything you see on a federated app other than the text of the post. That's not what it looks like on my side.
Anyway, Mudrunners is definitely a big time sink, but even there I'm surprised you never considered moving on to Snowruner or any of the spinoffs, or, I don't know, the Dakar game they made at some point, if you are into WRC. That's a surprising amount of passion and loyalty, but also of outright satisfaction with getting that version of that thing and never going back to the well.
Which is fine, it's legitimate, it's just a bit of an outlier way to go about it. Even the dudebros that only bought Madden/Fifa and Call of Duty bought those every year or every other year. The people who only played WoW or The Sims bought all the expansions or the characters in a fighting game. You are unusually focused, is what I'm saying.
Yeah, when I was replying you had 2 upvotes and 3 down. I gave you an upvote for a valid question to bring it to 3 and 3 lol.
I read reviews and many players said SnowRunner didn't have quite the same level of soft physics as mudrunners, almost like devs simplified it. So kind of like a hit movie gets a sequel and sequel is watered down. So if its on sale one day I may grab it, but I might regret it if they dropped part of the magic of the original.
Huh? Is calling them a baby supposed to be an insult? 200 games in 30 years would be a lot of games. It’s not like one buy a new game everyday. 6-10 games a year would already be a lot. Most find the handful they like and continually play them.
I’ve never seen the phrase “touch grass” be more appropriate ;)
There are at least 200 games at my local arcade. Few people beat them—and no one bats an eye at this fact.
I don’t see why PC games should be any different.
Is my intent to beat each game or is it just to have fun?
That's a pretty big arcade. There were maybe a couple dozen in my go-to, if that.
I wonder if that's where the generational thing comes from. I definitely sunk a lot of money in machines where I never got that far. Of the assortment I had access to in arcades I saw the end of story mode in maybe a handful. I was quite proud of 1cc-ing Double Dragon once. Otherwise it was considered to be a waste of money to dump money in continues. You'd play the first two stages of Metal Slug a million times and never see past them and everybody thought that was just how gaming was supposed to work.
No, no, not an insult. Like, literally are they a very young person and so 200 games is all they had the time to get around to. Like the OP I have thousands of games because it's been decades of building them up. Even just on Steam I've had what, twenty years? Just my Humble Bundle subscription has probably spat out more than 200 games, just because it's been on for long enough.
If you're young you have less disposable income and less time, so you don't have time to build up a library and you have more time to spend with each thing you get.
I mean, I still had what? 30/50 Mega Drive games by the end of that generation, and those were, inflation adjusted, maybe what, 200 bucks each?
For the record, I touched grass yesterday and that movie sucked.